A Postmodern Performance: Counter-Reading Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Maxine Hong Kingston's 'No Name Woman'

Published: James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch, eds. The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 183-96.

Description: Both ClT and Kingston's "No Name Woman" reveal how patriarchal culture operates to disguise male complicity in women's repression, and both connect issues of knowledge and power with the construction of subjectivity, showing how these are intimately tied up with the construction of sexual difference.; The Clerk takes issue with Petrarch's religious moral that erases gender, and argues that clerks-the class that controls knowledge-choose not to tell of women's suffering and forbearance. Kingston tells the story despite familial collusion in her father's desire to erase her aunt's existence.

Alternative Title: The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens.

Chaucer Subjects: Clerk and His Tale.; Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.